Damyant Singh Khanoria on social media and innovation

Big welcome to Damian from Oppo with a huge career in Indian marketing. Welcome Damian. Now before we get into the process of this I'm obsessed by one thing you told me before which is Sachin Tendulkar's socks. How on earth can this start a show about innovation? I've got my red socks tell us about his socks. Yeah it's a bit it's a bit of a story actually and I think the lead-up to what you kind of introduced the show as I think unlearning and understanding that most innovations come from a relevant question being asked and I think in the context of Sachin it was essentially this was 2007 and he essentially called us he called us up and said I need to kind of get an upgrade in my socks and this is in Adidas and so basically I did what

any good boarding school boy would do which is I picked the most expensive pair of socks in the range and I send it to him two days later he calls back and says nonsense doesn't work for me because what I sent him were a usual pair of towel socks and if you're playing cricket at the international stage you're on ground for like eight nine ten hours and what he wanted was a solve and this was like the latter part of his career and what he wanted was a solve with a sock that would not only give him the optimal amount of cushioning but would also kind of manage the the level of sweat that you kind of go through throughout a day and so what he wanted was not a regular towel sock but something

that would kind of enable him to wear the same pair throughout the day and allow him to feel better allow him to kind of not get blisters etc so it was a pretty tall ask. And this is where you're Sachin Chandulkar right constant incremental innovation no no little detail left untouched. Absolutely and I think socks is probably the last thing most athletes would think about but this is Sachin right and thankfully because it was Sachin you know we went in into a project which literally took us like eight months from start to finish where every second third week we would kind of create samples of of socks where we would kind of vary the level of polyester versus cotton thickness of

the sock we even Sachin I remember sent us a pair of baby socks that he kind of found in the UK which had these rubber pellets on the bottom saying that this could probably help him grip inside the shoe better so when he's fielding or when he's batting he'd probably get that extra level of support in the shoe etc so we went through a whole lot of iterations with the sock but the essence was he wanted something that literally would allow him to not feel that there was anything holding him back. Okay Damian so you've got the key customer Sachin input and you're going through an iterative process but tell us practically how did that work with the team? Did one person look at polyester another cotton? How did the magic of innovation actually happen?

It was it was actually iterative right I mean and so for us you know what we did was we kind of used the learnings from a lot of different sports right so Adidas being an Olympic sports brand we obviously had learnings from a host of different Olympic events we used actually learnings from even our tennis players so one of the things we realized was when you send Sachin a pair of socks that were out of the box socks that are created in the factory would still have a little bit of starch in them right and so when you wore them the first time they would feel

sort of slippery wouldn't feel as comfortable and so this was a learning that we got from Leander Pace who's another tennis great and he said he always wore his socks to matches after washing them and so when we started kind of creating these socks with the right amount of blend we actually used to pre-wash them and send them to Sachin because then they would kind of have the right feel match feel to kind of enable him to kind of get a real sense of the product so the process was iterative the process was literally of you know creating a product which would have like 25

75 75 percent ratios the thickness would kind of be something that would vary as well how much cushioning you put on what part of the foot would vary so it was a process that was iterative but it took us time purely because Sachin as you would expect is a very exacting personality and so he just wouldn't relent with something that he was not really very happy with and was it was it strangely exciting I've never thought socks are particularly exciting but but actually there's a funny thing isn't there about innovation where the oddest subjects can be innately very interesting if you get into it

absolutely and I think what we ended up with was a product that was I wish it was the age of social media because such an amazing story to tell right about the the lens to which you've gone to kind of create a product that you don't even kind of give an afterthought to so the amount of work that went into the creation of the sock to the no seam sock I actually have a couple of pairs and 16 years in I still wear them right now so we basically created a tank of a sock that this gentleman loved and you know hopefully it helped him make his it's it's an awesome way to start our inner show in a show but sort of moving moving up from the socks further up let's talk about this thing right yeah

you talked about this thing being the little monster right tell us a bit about because you assume with innovation that it's just constantly doing more but actually with this fellow it's a bit about doing less isn't it talk to us particularly with your current oppo experience and Apple about how you think about tech marketing yeah and is less more yeah so so you know the the age of smartphones is what we've lived to now for about a decade and a half

and what we're kind of you know increasingly trying to do at oppo is these are amazing productivity devices you can't live without one but you know what we're trying to do is for example with the product that we've just launched recently we try to kind of put the tech into the background and let make it less intrusive and so what we've done with the oppo finance is essentially let the the product sit in the background and still behave and act as the productivity device that it's supposed to without it necessarily intruding into your life

so what we've done for example is the cover screen of the phone literally runs 40 apps so you don't even need to kind of lift your phone or unfold it for you to kind of use your phone to make a call or otherwise send a message back what we've realized is you know smartphones of course add a lot of I mean people literally run run their careers and professions on a smartphone but they've also been very intrusive and so what we're going to do is bring a sense of balance in in how smartphones behave and the role that they play in your lives and we've done this through various ways this of course is one way

the other for example is this notion of nomophobia which is the fear that people have of not having the phone on them or the fear of their phones running out of battery yeah it's like mileage anxiety in an EV right correct so so this notion of nomophobia is again something that you know we've tried to kind of ease by introducing innovations like we call it super VOOC but you can literally charge your phone and open device in in less than 10 minutes to 100% right this basically means that even if you've kind of forgotten overnight to charge your phone you can literally do it between you going into

oh I mean breakfast and finishing of breakfast and your phones fully charged so there are these small little iteration that we kind of making this this what we call this notion of I trade of innovation or what we we kind of credit this as being innovation that impacts society positively at large so okay so this notion of you know how can we improve lives on an ongoing basis so well that's interesting isn't it because innovation is not abstract in the sense that innovation has to have a purpose and I'm sure with our other guests we'll talk a bit about

you know what is the social purpose of innovation but before we get to that Damian you know you've done Adidas you've done the mighty Apple Oppo now you know you've had a big career and you're only really in the second innings of a sort of five day test but where are you at with innovation what's your personal innovation credo do you have one is it is it just process is it light bulb how do you think about that

yeah so so you know I think there are a couple of there are a couple of philosophies that I follow in life and I think the first one is is simply about you know you should not go to your your life without you know evolving as you move along right and I think if you think about the tech world it's a bit like having a soft soft grade software upgrade over a period of time but I think going through life without acknowledging that you need to kind of evolve and change on an ongoing basis I think is the

is the first part so this notion of continuous improvement the sense of always being seeking being curious is I think super important right and I think this is something which is is embedded in me since I was a kid my dad was in the army you know and we would basically move and you were in like eight schools by the age of eight perhaps exactly exactly and so we would basically move schools you would move cities every two three years and I think what it did to me was essentially forced me to kind of you

evolve as a person you were a very different person if you were in Bombay versus what you were in a small city called Ferozpur in Punjab so you learn to kind of evolve as an individual and I think that was one part of it which is this constant sense of being curious and improving oneself over a period of time so I think that was one element of it and the other one which since you're talking about context of sport the other one that I really kind of find useful is what the all blacks use which is this notion of

divine discontent you know and the all blacks as you know are one of the most successful teams in team sports and the notion of divine discontent essentially is never being happy with where you are and what you might have done because there's always something in what you've done or what you've created or what you've put out in the world

where in which you should seek the imperfection right you should always kind of try and figure out what can I do better what is it that I can kind of improve even further because this notion of divine discontent can be seen as being you being perennially unhappy but on the other side it's also the sense of constantly seeking ways to kind of self improve and so for me that's another element that I kind of draw a lot of inspiration from in the way I think and behave.

Damien I think that's a fantastic place to sign off despite the fact that we'll now suffer divine discontent having to terminate our session but a bit about socks a bit about phones a bit about the all blacks you've come a long way from for us Paul thank you so much for being on Trailblazers we really appreciate it.